Tuesday Treasures on Wednesday - City-Wide Art Find - October 2, 2024

 To continue the BIG yard sale artwork purchase, let's start with a Salvador Dali lithograph, signed in pencil in the border.  This was still sealed with an old price sticker, perhaps from a museum, or art gallery.  The name Salvador Dali is so well known it's assumed his signed lithographs are valuable.  Not necessarily.  Some are, however he was quite prolific in creating and signing them.  He'd even sign blank paper that would be printed later.

Dali painted this as one of his illustrations to Cellini's autobiography.  It is The Divine Eye, or Eye of God.  He painted quite a few surreal eyes so it's hard to find what name is which.

Surprisingly, this little watercolor may well be the most valuable of the day's purchases.  It's by the Italian painter Roberto Scognamiglio (1901-1985).  He is known for his Italian scenes and landscapes, as well as recreations of frescoes in Pompeii, such as this one c1920s - 1930s.  "La Corsa" translates to "Chariot Race."

left: Grief of the Pasha was a supplement to the Minneapolis Sunday Times, which was only published between 1889-1901, which, while I can't find another of this supplement,  narrows down the date.  The original painting was done by Jean-Léon Gérôme in 1882.  right: c1900 scene of a noble 1800s baptism from a painting by Maurice Leloir.

There is a lot going on in Gin Lane! 

William Hogarth created this engraving in 1751 as part of his campaign to raise awareness of the dangers of gin, and support of the Gin Act of 1751.  It has a companion engraving, Beer Street, which highlights the positives of beer drinking as a wholesome beverage!  

The original engraved copper plate is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.  Mine is one of the few I've found online that is printed the same as the plate, rather than in reverse.  It does not have the text in the lower margin, but rather a number, indicating it probably came from a book.  

A mother so drunk on gin she drops her baby.

Here we see a mother force-feeding her baby gin, a dog apparently begging for gin from a starving man, another dog sharing a bone with a drunk man, and more force-feeding.

Houses were left to fall to ruin, the priest worked overtime praying over the dead, and for the souls of those who hanged themselves, as a man holding a bellows on his head runs through the street with a baby impaled on... a giant nail?  It must be some tool citizens of the time would recognize, something that went with the bellows. 

A hand-colored photograph of the 1906 San Francisco fire that started by broken gas lines from huge fissures in the streets, and fallen lamps and candles, during the 1906 earthquake.

Something more lighthearted is this train engineer caricature and poem. I find nothing on this one at all.  

Since I still have 60 Harper's Weekly (most from the 1870s) and a scrapbook from the late 1800s, it's best if we leave off here for now.  Those will be next week. 

 As I said, it was a BIG artwork sale!